When was the last time your computer couldn’t keep up with your typing? Yeah, thought so… about never. (If you have an example, then you need to try different software!) So I appreciate Clay Shirky’s recent essay comparing “grid computing” to “push”. There are so few people who really need more cycles. Businesses do, but not people. Shirky writes, in part:
As long ago as 1968, J.R. Licklider predicted that computers would one day be more important as devices of communication than of computation, a prediction that came true when email overtook the spreadsheet as the core application driving PC purchases.
The Licklider essay is online (PDF). A 1964 viewpoint of “autonomic computation” was published in The Atlantic Monthly as “The Computers of Tomorrow. Remember your history.